Daniel come to judgement

Nearly three years after he was allegedly beaten to death, six ABVP activists accused in the case of murder of Prof H S Sabharwal in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, were recently acquitted by a court for lack of evidence.
The accused were all activists of the sangh parivar affliated-Akhil Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), who were charged with murder and rioting by an unlawful assembly. Additional District and Sessions Judge Nitin Dalvi, who tried the case after the Supreme Court ordered transfer of trial from the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, observed that the prosecution has "miserably failed" to prove the case against the accused. The professor's son, Himanshu, who successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for transfer of the case, claimed that the Sessions judge has noted in his judgement that the accused might be guilty but yet, he could not convict them because of lack of evidence. His family would challenge today's judgement in a higher court, he said. Prof. Sabharwal, Head of the Political Science Department of Madhav College, Ujjain, died in August, 2006, after a fracas in the college over student union elections when he was allegedly beaten up by the ABVP activists. Later, he succumbed in a hospital.
[All accused Professor Sabharwal murder case acquitted -PTI 13 July 2009[ TIMES OF INDIA]
The video clipping aired over all the news channels was devastating and yet the judge lamented that the case was not presented properly.


Recent analysis shows that it takes any where beyond 12 years to get compensation for custodial deaths in police custody.

This has led me to revisit the stories we have heard as children as to how justice prevailed in earlier days and also some of the well publicized cases.
SHYLOCK:
A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel!
O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!
Many of us have enjoyed the dramatic rantings and ravings of Shylock and his praise for the judge before the twist in the tale.

Two women ,living together delivered baby boys.Unfortunately one mother smothered her child in sleep but managed to exchange her dead baby with the live one of the other lady.Next day the other lady smelt a rat and suspected that the live one was her son.The case reached King Solomon’s court with both the ladies claiming the live boy as their own.The king after deep deliberation asked for a sword and ordered the live boy to be split into two and one half handed over to each lady.On hearing this,the real mother pleaded with the king not to split the baby and it was alLright if the boy was handed over to the other lady. The liar on the other hand accepted the verdict.King Solomon could thereby identify the real mother and hand over the boy to her.

Manu Needhi Cholan was one of the greatest kings of the chola dynasty known for his fairness and justice.He had hung a great bell in the court yard of his palace and any one with a complaint could ring the bell and seek justice.Surprisingly,one day a cow whose calf was run over by his chariot rang the bell.To give out impartial justice the king ordered his own son to be killed so as to suffer similar pangs on losing the offspring.

All of us are aware of the famous Kovalan Kannagi story.On the mistaken impression that the anklet being sold by Kovalan was stolen, the Pandya king executed kovalan.Kannagi proved the king wrong and the upset king and queen died immediately.

We have all heard the stories of Tenali Ramakrishna who was attached to the court of Emperor Krishnadevaraya.Ramakrishna looked like a comic figure but used humour to see that justice was done when things went wrong. Krishnadevaraya's mother once wanted to give fruit in charity and informed so to her son.Krishnadevaraya brought delicious mangos from Ratnagiri and before he could distribute them on an auspicious day his mother died.When the king explained his predicament to the Brahmins,they suggested that the king should distribute golden mangos to appease the departed soul.The king did so.When Ramakrishna heard of this he invited the Brahmins to perform his mother’s ceremonyThe Brahmins came to Ramakrishna's house after receiving the gold mangoes from the king. Ramakrishna's servants closed all the doors of thehouse. They brought red-hot iron bars and stood before the shocked brahmins.Then Ramakrishna told them his mother had knee pains and as remedy wanted Ramakrishna to burn her with read hot rods but she died before he could do it. So he now wanted to execute her wish. When the Brahmins said he was unjust towards them, Ramakrishna said that there was nothing unjust because they had just taken golden mangoes from the king. Then the Brahmins understood their folly and left the golden mangoes at Ramakrishna’s house and left. A simple story which had us clapping as children.


One of the finest judgements I have read is what Fiorello La Guardia pronounced as Mayor of New York City.While presiding over a night court on a wintry night,a trembling man was brought before him for stealing a loaf of bread..The accused pleaded for mercy as the entire family was starving.However the Mayor fined him 10$ and took out the money from his pocket to pay the fine on behalf of the accused..Further he fined the spectators in the court 50 cents each for living in a city where a man has to steal bread in order to eat.The bailiff passed the hat around and 47.5$ collected was handed over to the defendant, for buying food for the family.

Let us now discuss some of the outstanding judgements in recent times. It is a delight to read Justice Krishnaiyer’s judgement.In a case against Raj Kapoor’s Satyam,Shivam, Sundaram on the grounds of prurience,moral depravity and shocking erosion of public decency he had this to say:“Art, morals and law’s manacles on aesthetics or area sensitive
subjects where jurisprudence meets other social sciences and never goes alone to bark and bite because State-made strait-jacket is an inhibitive prescription for a free country unless enlightened society actively participates in the administration of justice to aesthetics.The world’s greatest paintings, sculptures, songs and dances, India’s lustrous heritage, the Konarks and Khajurahos, lofty epics, luscious in patches, maybe asphyxiated by law, if prudes and prigs and State moralists prescribe paradigms and prescribe heterodoxies.”

In the Jessica lal murder case ,the Supreme Court rejected bail application of Manu Sharma, who is serving life imprisonment.Model Jessica Lal was shot at point blank range on the night of April 29, 1999 while she was working as a barmaid at the Tamarind Court Bar owned by socialite Bina Ramani.It was alleged that Jessica was murdered by Manu Sharma, alias Siddharth Vashist, son of Congress politician and former Union Minister Vinod Sharma, after she refused him a drink since the bar had closed for the day.In its primary investigation, the Delhi Police also indicted Vikas Yadav, the son of Uttar Pradesh's heavy weight politician DP Yadav, along with ten others.The sensational murder case had a high profile list of accused The verdict had come after a long hiatus of six years in which the case saw numerous twists and turns with a large number of witnesses turning hostile.

Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Surinder Koli were sentenced to death by a special court in Ghaziabad for the rape and murder of 14-year-old Rimpa Haldar, one of the 19 victims in the Nithari serial killings. Pronouncing the sentence, Special CBI judge Rama Jain held the crimes committed by 55-year-old Pandher and 38-year-

old Koli to be the ‘rarest of rare’ deserving capital punishment. Pandher broke into tears while Koli remained unmoved. "No more penalty could be awarded to the accused persons otherwise they deserve more punishment as their act of murder and rape in this particular case was beyond all the canons of humanity," the judge said.


In Islamic and Arab traditions, blood money is the fine paid by the killer or his family or clan to the family or the clan of the victim. It is unlawful for a believer to kill a believer except if it happens by accident. And he who kills a believer accidentally must pay Diyat to the heirs of the victim except if they forgive him.

In Saudi Arabia,it is reported that when a person has been killed or caused to die by another, the prescribed blood money rates range from3333 riyals for a Hindu woman to 100,000 riyals if the victim was a Muslim man.The amount of compensation is based on the percentage of responsibility. Blood money is to be paid not only for murder, but also in case of
unnatural death, interpreted to mean death in a fire, industrial or road accident, for instance, as long as the responsibility for it falls on the causer

The Taliban in Swat awarded punishment of public flogging about 25 times to men and twice to women during the past two years as they consolidated their control in the valley and established their own courts.The videotape shown on television and displayed on websites recently wasn't the only time that a woman was publicly canned by the Swati Taliban.
However, no videotape of the other incident, which took place on October 20, 2008, is available in which a woman and her father-in-law were flogged in Ser-Taligram village near Manglawar in Charbagh tehsil. The woman had been divorced by her husband but her father-in-law kept her in his house. The two were accused by the Taliban of having illicit relations.
Villagers said the man was whipped 50 times while the woman was given 30 lashes.

In conclusion,I t is an endurance test to seek justice in a court of law in India, considering the huge backlog of cases and the ease with which adjournment is granted.This only proves the saying:
”that the judicial process is a cow.The public is impaled on its horns,the government
has it by the tail and all the while the lawyers are milking it”.
According to another saying,the lawyers believe that a man is innocent until proven bankrupt.

Let me break the seriousness of this article by sharing with you a joke I came across on the internet:

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.